Michigan Radio News

NPR News

August 31, 2009

Since its beginnings, America has been a beacon of freedom for those suffering political persecution elsewhere. Michigan Radio’s Political Analyst Jack Lessenberry looks at a place keeping that tradition alive...

I am spending some time with some real Americans this afternoon. Thirty-eight of them, in fact. None of them were born here.

However, most risked their lives to come here. Nearly all have been tortured, frequently in ways too terrible to mention. Not a single one is a U.S. citizen, and they don’t even have a legal right to stay in this country, unless they are granted political asylum.

They are the men and women who live in Freedom House, a century-old red brick former convent that sits in the shadow of the Ambassador Bridge. For nearly thirty years Freedom House has been a refuge for those who desperately need political asylum.

People in Flint and Grand Rapids may not know about Freedom House; some people in Detroit don’t. But they know about it in Managua and Kinshasa, in the torture pits of Somalia and Kosovo. Exhausted, injured and half-starved, they turn up at Freedom House’s door with a scrawled address in their hands, an address carried sometimes halfway across the world.

It’s run these days by Deborah Drennan, a native Michigander who lives in Macomb County, and who believes in the American dream, and in the words carved on the Statue of Liberty.

Except the people whose lives she watches over at Freedom House have had a far worse time than most of the millions who came through Ellis Island. In a way, they are more like the Americans who arrived on the Mayflower, four centuries ago.

They have been persecuted for their beliefs, and are seeking asylum. There is a difference, however. Most of the Puritans hadn’t been tortured. The vast majority of the refugees in Freedom House have been raped. Yes, both men, and women.

Nor are today’s asylum seekers the scum of the earth. The thirty-eight at Freedom House include accountants and teachers, economists and four Ph.Ds. Some were guilty merely of being a member of a particular ethnic or social group.

“We do work that no one else does,” Drennan told me. “We are the only organization in the country to provide a full range of services to those seeking asylum -- shelter, clothing, legal aid, medical care to heal injuries from torture, English classes and job training to provide them with opportunities.” When they are allowed to work, the refugees are extremely popular with employers; they have an amazing work ethic. But Freedom House is in financial trouble.

The economy is part of that. They’ve lost some grants, and contributions are down. Drennan and her small staff are doing the best they can. They’ve had to cut back on services. She wasn’t making much money, but took almost a 20 percent pay cut.

Today, she’s struggling to raise the money they need to keep the place open. But she’s also struggling with an anti-immigrant attitude in the land an idea that people like those at Freedom House aren’t “real Americans.”

Here‘s what she thinks: “What makes us unique is that we believe anyone who flees oppression to seek safety and freedom in America is ‘one of our own.’

That’s something the Founding Fathers believed too, by the way. If you want to help a truly American institution in these troubled times, you’d have a hard time doing better than this.

August 28, 2009

The clock is ticking and time is running out on Michigan's
efforts to avoid another government shutdown. To try and get some
perspective on what's happening, Michigan Radio's Jack Lessenberry looks
back on Popeye cartoons.

During the golden age of TV cartoons, aka the fifties, kids grew up
watching a character called Popeye the Sailor Man, whose slogan was "I'm
strong to the finish, cuz I eat my spinach."

I prefer to think of that, incidentally, not as really bad writing, but an
early primitive form of educational TV. That is a pretty clear illustration
of the law of cause and effect, after all.

Popeye, by the way, had a friend named Wimpy, whose well-developed
philosophy of life deserves examination.

Understanding Wimpy's moral framework may provide an essential clue to our
problem. Wimpy summed up his world view this way: "I'd gladly pay you
Tuesday for a hamburger today."

The key to Wimpy's well-being was the belief that somehow, Tuesday would
never arrive. Those running our state might not admit it, but they felt
exactly the same way. Unfortunately, Tuesday is approaching fast. And our
leaders don't seem to have a clue. Yesterday, there was a knock-down,
drag-out fight in the state senate over the governor's executive order
abolishing the Department of History, Arts and Libraries. Personally, I
think this was a bad decision.

Apart from the fact that breaking up and scattering the state's archives
is stupid, it doesn't save much money: $2 million, at best, and
the state needs more than a thousand times that.

Yet few if any of the senators brought that up. They ended up voting to
reject the governor's order, which now goes to the house.

What you have to wonder is how are they going to react when they are
presented with a budget that orders something like two billion dollars in
cuts. Virtually everyone is going to have a program they care about deeply
affected -- or abolished.

Actually, we don't have much of a clue as to how the governor and the
legislative leaders plan to go about balancing this budget, because they've
been meeting behind closed doors for what seems like forever. But when and
if they emerge with a plan, don't automatically expect the rest of the
lawmakers to fall in line.

Nobody seems emotionally prepared for what is coming. In Detroit, where
the schools have enormous deficits and kids are fleeing the system in
droves, teachers say they can't afford more cuts. That's a little like
saying in a shipwreck, "I'm sorry, but I just don't do lifeboats,
especially if they aren't clean."

What is happening is this. We have gotten accustomed to a certain level of
services from state and local government. We all want to keep getting those
services, at least the ones that most directly affect us. However, the
mechanism for raising enough to pay for them isn't doing it any more.
Actually, it hasn't for some time; they've just covered it with smoke and
mirrors.

Now our leaders have to make a huge choice. Will they ask us to give up a
lot -- or ask us to pay a lot more to keep getting it?

Most of us still don't have a clue what is going on, much less what our
so-called leaders are thinking. And we have exactly thirty-three days to
get this resolved, passed and signed... or state government shuts down.

Yesterday, members of the Michigan Senate paused for a moment of silence to remember Senator Edward Kennedy, the truly larger-than-life figure who died of brain cancer Tuesday night.

The governor noted that the “lion of Massachusetts fought his entire career for health care for all Americans.” The lieutenant governor called Kennedy’s contributions in the areas of health care, civil rights, education and labor law “immeasurable.”

Yet elsewhere, on right-wing blogs and in dark corners everywhere, there were those gleeful at his passing. People who saw Kennedy as the ultimate example of a bloated, out-of-control liberal who spent their money while living a scandalous life.

Yet what neither his friends or his foes may have realized is that Senator Kennedy’s life and career holds an important lesson for government in Michigan. His successes best illustrate the main thing that is wrong with state government today, namely, term limits.

Hours after Kennedy’s death, President Obama called him the greatest senator of our lifetime. He later amended that to “one of the greatest senators,” probably to soothe the egos of the other 99.

But many people thought he got it right the first time. And I suspect a large number of those were his Republican colleagues. Teddy Kennedy was the man conservatives most liked to bash. But Senate Republicans seemed especially stricken by his loss, especially Orrin Hatch of Utah and John McCain of Arizona. They mourned the loss of his bipartisan ability to get things done.

Both of them said if Kennedy had been healthy, health care reform would have been figured out and passed by now. Kennedy was, indeed, one of the Senate’s most liberal members. But more than any of his colleagues, he had the ability to get both sides to come to an agreement everyone could live with.

That wasn’t because Ted Kennedy was brilliant. It was because had been there so long and worked so hard at his job. Ironically, he never wanted to be a senator at all. His father pushed him into running for his brother’s old seat when JFK became president.

“If your name was Edward Moore, instead of Edward Moore Kennedy, your candidacy would be a joke,“ an opponent told him in that first race. That wasn’t wrong.

Name recognition got him to Washington, however. Once there, he got sound advice from Michigan’s Phil Hart. Work hard, do your homework, and keep your head down for awhile. Kennedy did that.

In the end, he evolved into one of history’s greatest senators. The list of his accomplishments is long, including the Americans with Disabilities Act, as is the list of legislation others sponsored which would never have become reality without Senator Kennedy’s help.

The point is that his brilliant career wouldn’t have happened if Congress had the ridiculous term limits that cripple the Michigan Legislature today. Our state is headed for a shutdown precisely because we have no seasoned statesmen who can reason together.

If there was ever a silly experiment that needed changing, term limits is it. We should look at the distinguished career of the man they are about to bury at Arlington, and then do the right thing and change Michigan’s constitution, just as fast as we can.

Jennifer Granholm has sent an e-mail to her supporters across the state, urging them to give money to John Cherry’s campaign to replace her next year. What’s not clear is whether she is doing him more good than harm. In the short run, this will help him.

Money is the mother’s milk of politics, and next year’s gubernatorial race will be expensive. Candidates like Mike Cox and Pete Hoekstra are already running hard for their party’s nomination.

Cherry is a seasoned political figure who has spent seven years as lieutenant governor. However, his own campaign for governor has two massive strikes against it. For one thing, the Granholm administration is deeply unpopular. Political insiders have been frustrated with the governor’s inability to lead.

Normal voters know that the economy is horrible, and hundreds of thousands of Michiganders have lost jobs in the last year. Traditionally, voters tend to blame the party in power.

People haven’t liked the way things are going for quite some time. Michigan Republicans suffered for that in 2006, when Governor Granholm was reelected in a landslide, and last year, when President Obama had an even bigger win in Michigan.

Unhappiness with President George W. Bush was largely to blame in both cases. But Republicans are no longer in power. Next year, they intend to campaign hard against Granholm, and are trying to blame her for the economy, and to blame the lieutenant governor for all her failings. In fact, they are already referring to the last seven years as the “Cherry-Granholm administration.”

That may be a bit of a stretch. But in practice, for some mysterious reason, lieutenant governors, like vice presidents, tend to get all of the blame and none of the credit for their administrations.

When they run for the top job, the voters tend to punish them. Dick Posthumus, lieutenant governor under John Engler, lost to Jennifer Granholm in 2002. Twenty years before that, Lieutenant Governor Jim Brickley couldn’t even win his own party’s primary. In fact, in modern times, the only lieutenant governor to get elected to the top job was John Swainson, who won a very narrow victory on John F. Kennedy’s coattails in 1960.

This year, Democrats have made a decision to try to head off a primary fight and circle the wagons around John Cherry as their man. By the way State Representative Alma Wheeler Smith is also running for the Democratic nomination, as is John Freeman, a former legislator. Unfortunately for them, they have little money.

However, the Democrats may get a major primary fight whether they want one or not, if House Speaker Andy Dillon gets into the race. There is one thing Granholm could do if she were really serious about helping Cherry. She could resign.

That would give him a year to compile a record as governor on his own. That’s what happened to Bill Milliken, who was lieutenant governor until George Romney left to join the Nixon Administration.

Milliken went on to win three terms. But Ms. Granholm doesn’t seem inclined to leave. So, John Cherry faces an uphill battle next year, but despite all I’ve just said, we should remember the greatest of all political maxims: You just never can tell.

I feel a little better about life in Michigan today. Oh yes, I know the budget deficit is still out of control and the politicians are as irresponsible as ever. I know that unemployment is still fifteen percent and it is far from certain that General Motors will make it.

But there is hope that life may be returning to normal. Today I picked up a copy of the Detroit News, and there it was, splashed across the front page.

New Claims, Gun Surface in Hoffa Saga, said the headline. Well, actually I didn’t really pick up the paper. The Detroit papers aren’t delivered on Tuesdays, and you have to read them on-line.

But you get the idea. I eagerly read on. Sure enough, another ex-con has come forward to claim that he knows what happened to James Riddle Hoffa, the iconic corrupt labor leader who disappeared outside a suburban Detroit restaurant on July 30, 1975.

The man, a small-time check forger and embezzler named Ted Lee Stall, says he saw Hoffa buried at a farm in north Oakland County. He also produced a gun he says was used to kill Hoffa.

As you might expect, all indications are that Ted Stall’s claims are almost certainly not true. The Genesee County prosecutor described him as a “serial flim-flam artist and a longtime con man.”

An author who is one of the most knowledgeable experts on the Hoffa saga, said the once and future convict has no credibility whatsoever. What’s more, Stall has an axe to grind. He is awaiting trial on a fraud-related charge. His accuser in that case is the widow of the man who he now claims killed Jimmy Hoffa.

By the way, Stall was also convicted the other day of writing bad checks in Genesee County. I wouldn’t let your daughter date him, if I were you. So you might ask, what is this silliness doing on page one? And why do we care?

The answer, my children, is that since 1975, one of the rites of a Michigan summer has been a new claim that someone knows where Hoffa is buried. There is no real mystery about what actually happened to Jimmy Hoffa. A once-visionary labor leader who got mixed up with organized crime, Hoffa eventually went to prison for bribery and jury tampering. He was trying to reclaim power in 1975, when he was picked up outside a restaurant and never seen again.

Everybody agrees the mob knocked him off. What nobody knows, however, is what they did with his body. Never mind that most Michiganders were born after Hoffa died, and that you have to be in your later forties or older to have any memory of him.

Never mind that nobody sane cares any more where Hoffa’s bones are. It is a time-honored ritual, sure as snow in winter and the Lions losing in fall, that every summer, someone will claim Hoffa is buried somewhere, and the cops will then dig an expensive hole.

This hadn’t happened for three years now, and I was really starting to worry. But tonight I can look at the ceiling, and think, “they are looking for Jimmy Hoffa again. Everything is going to be all right.”

August 24, 2009

Governor Granholm announced today that the Michigan Department of Transportation is seeking hundreds of millions of federal dollars to help bring high-speed rail service to the state. Michigan Radio’s Political Analyst Jack Lessenberry has been thinking about whether or not that makes sense...

Governor Jennifer Granholm is taking an Amtrak train today from Dearborn to Jackson. Once she gets there, she plans to talk about high-speed rail, which she is boosting as a transportation option of the future. The question is, does that make sense?

The answer, I think, is yes -- and I am not a big fan of mass transit in general. On a local level, mass transit is one of those things that sounds better than it really would be. You can find passionate advocates of building a light rail system in every town.

They believe fervently that it would be good for the environment, and that it would be heavily used.

Heavily used, that is, by people other than themselves. But mass transit doesn’t make sense for lots of us. Take me, for example. I started my morning in the Detroit area, and have to go to four widely separated places in Toledo. Then I have to pick up an elderly woman, make a stop in Monroe and go back to Detroit.

Even if any kind of mass transit were available to do all that, it would add hours to my wait time. I’m not going to be interested, as long as I can get access to a private car, even if it runs on coal oil and hamster sweat.

But high-speed rail linking different cities is something else again. I have traveled on the famous bullet trains in Japan, and Europe, and loved them. And I suspect the vast majority of Americans would too. Airplane travel long ago lost its charm and convenience. If I could take a fast train to Chicago or Washington I would, in a heartbeat. I have no fear of flying, but have driven to both those places recently just to avoid the hassle of airports.

Yes, high-speed rail would be expensive. I think any plan to get us there must invest heavily in making sure the track and roadbed are in shape and other safety precautions are in place.

All it would take is one nasty high-speed derailment to sour the public on trains for a long time to come.

Last month, Governor Granholm and representatives of seven other Midwestern states signed what they called a Memorandum of Understanding to work together to fund a high-speed rail line they are calling the Midwest Corridor.

What they want to do next is get as much as possible of the $8 billion dollars that President Obama has made available for high speed passenger rail. In fact, the deadline for Michigan’s application for this money is today, so let’s hope we used adequate postage.

Not surprisingly, the President hasn’t asked my advice, but if he did, here’s what I’d say. Instead of parceling out that $8 billion a little bit here and there, use as much of it as possible to build one demonstration line -- preferably, the Midwest Corridor.

Build it right, and show everyone how well high-speed rail would work, so they can see if they want to build other lines across the nation. Build this line, and let’s see if they will come.

Well, the cash-for-clunkers program is finally ending, and its success has
made it very hard to argue that the government can't do anything right.
The Obama Administration has done an excellent job stimulating auto sales,
right when the industry most needed it.

Nobody is ever going to be completely satisfied. For example, the dealers
are moaning because, they say, it is taking a long time to reimburse them.
Well, we should be sympathetic, but not too sympathetic. The fact that they
don't get their money the next day may mean the government is actually
scrutinizing the paper work.

This was a three billion dollar program with lots of potential for massive
fraud, if we weren't careful. Fortunately, the feds apparently are
following the rules, and according to Washington, a large number of the
early applications have been bounced back for incomplete or inaccurate
paperwork. They built some safeguards into this program, in an attempt to
make sure that nobody cashed in on phantom cars or wrecks that they towed
in from junkyards.

Now, nobody thinks that dealers ought to have their money tied up forever.
But based on what I'm seeing, they aren't waiting any longer than most of
us wait for our income tax refunds.

So cash-for-clunkers worked to give the automakers a shot in the arm. It
will be months before we really know how well it worked. Oh, we know it
moved more than half a million cars off dealer lots.

But what we don't know is this: Did the program merely speed up purchases
that were going to be made in the next few months anyway? Or were people
trading in cars they might have hung onto for years? If car sales fall
dramatically after clunkers ends, and stay poor for months, we'll know that
it didn't really prime the pump.

When all the data is in, the cash-for-clunkers report should hold some
valuable lessons for the domestic auto industry. For one thing, the early
data indicates we may soon have a new Number One car manufacturer: Toyota.
Preliminary figures indicate that about 19 percent of new car sales under
the clunker program are Toyotas.

General Motors cars accounted for about 17.6 percent, which is a bit
better, frankly, than I thought they would do.

There's something else that bothered me about this program. Many of the
cars turned in were not true "clunkers" as I think of them. There were a
lot of ten-year-old cars that were still perfectly good.

After all, you only had to buy a new car that got as little as five miles
a gallon better than your old one to qualify.

Yesterday in Detroit, I passed a 1978 Ford Fairmont, belching fumes.
Later, I saw a 1970 Chevy Impala with one of its doors wired shut and a big
crack across the back window. Those sorts of cars are the real polluters,
not to mention eyesores. However, they wouldn't have qualified for the
cash-for-clunkers program.

No car made before 1984 did. Now -- wouldn't it have been nice to find
some way of destroying these cars, and transferring the alleged circa 1995
clunkers to their owners? Well, maybe next time.

August 20, 2009

One of the better things to happen in my lifetime is that it is no longer
permissible, at least in polite company, to show open disrespect for
minority groups. Fifty years ago you could say absolutely outrageous things
about blacks or Hispanics, the disabled or even women, and get away with
it. When it came to gay people, you got in trouble only if you said
something nice about them.

Today, however, there is still one group who you can trash with impunity: illegal immigrants. If someone were writing the poem on the Statue of
Liberty today, they would probably have it say, "Give us your tired, your
poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of
your teeming shore -- and we'll kick them out."

Actually, we don't really want to throw them all out, since many of them
help keep the economy humming by doing the jobs that we don't want to do.
We geniuses, that is, who had the foresight to be born in the Estados
Unidos.

Illegals are the last hired, first fired, and usually the worst paid, but
when times get tough, we love to bash those undocumented aliens. Which
brings us to a new bill in the Michigan Legislature, sponsored by State
Rep. David Agema, a Republican from Grandville. Agema wants to require any
Michigan firm that does work for the public sector to screen their new
hires. Not just screen them; he wants to make them use an electronic,
Internet-based system devised by the Department of Homeland Security.

Yes, it sounds like something out of 1984, but the idea is to catch those
awful illegals and prevent them from getting jobs. Agema says this could
save the state $600 million a year in uncollected income taxes. However,
there are few problems with this scheme.

First of all, the system, called E-Verify, sounds high-tech, but in
reality relies on matching records based on paper documents that could be
faked. Early indications show that E-Verify has a four percent error rate,
which means one out of every 25 results is wrong. One can just smell the
lawsuits coming.

Plus, anyone with common sense would realize that this system would
actually encourage unlawful behavior. If it came into use, it would
encourage employers to pay illegals in cash, under the table, as they say.

The good news is that Agema's bill is probably not going anywhere, despite
our fondness for immigrant bashing. Democrats control the House, and they
aren't rushing his bill along.

The Michigan Chamber of Commerce opposes it, saying it would force
employers to become the immigration police.

And there are a few of us who know that there is a little hypocrisy in all
of this. After all, virtually all of us are descended from people the local
Chippewas regarded as illegal.

By the way, Mr. Agema isn't totally against other countries. Two years
ago, when the state briefly shut down after a bruising budget battle, Agema
was about the only member not to vote.

Why? He was off in Siberia for three weeks hunting wild sheep. Well, we
all have our priorities. You just can't make this stuff up.

August 19, 2009

I have some top-secret information to convey to the Michigan Legislature
which could be of enormous help to them in figuring out how to balance the
budget. They have to do that in the next six weeks, you know, or the
government will shut down.

Okay, here goes. Two plus two makes four. Got that?
What is so complex about that? Well, nothing, unless you happen to be in
the legislature. The lawmakers have to pass a balanced budget by September
30.

If they don't, the state will stop working, except perhaps for a few
emergency functions. What is clear is that you won't be able to get a
driver's license renewed or your car's title transferred or any of the many
other services we take for granted.

Normally, the lawmakers finish haggling and get the budget passed in
July. This year, however, they are looking at a budget deficit of nearly
three billion dollars.

There has never been a shortfall like that in Michigan history. You would
think that, in the interests of us all, our lawmakers would be working
full-time to figure out what to do.

You'd think our governor would come on television to alert us to the
seriousness of the situation. You'd expect her to present a plan to us
citizens, so we could debate and argue about it.

But sadly, you'd be wrong. The lawmakers have been meeting behind closed
doors. Nobody knows what they are talking about, but indications are they
haven't made much progress.

Nor have they reached out to tell their constituents, that is to say, us,
what is at stake. In fact, they don't seem to have much of a grip on
reality. Here is the message most of them are sending: "Whatever happens,
we are against raising taxes.

"But whatever happens, they just better not cut my pet program." So, for
example, Kate Segal, who represents Battle Creek in the House, is fighting
to save the Youth Challenge Academy. Marie Donigan of Royal Oak is trying
to protect public transportation funding. Others are rallying around the
film industry credit.

But nobody is saying what they should be saying, which is this: "Hello,
people, listen up:

"We don't have any money, largely because so many people are out of work.
If you want to continue getting the benefits that the state has been
providing, like parks and roads and good schools and prisons to lock up the
bad guys, guess what:

"You are going to have to pay for it! You want this stuff, your taxes are
going to go up, by this much, right now."

I would respect any lawmaker with the guts to say that. On the other hand,
Senate Majority Leader Mike Bishop's priority is not raising taxes. Matter
of fact, he would like to lower them.

Okay, fine, so tell us right now how you come up with three billion in
cuts. If he did that, I would respect him, too.

But right now, we have a governor and 148 legislators who are united in
resisting the news that two plus two is four. And as a result, they are
doing their best to send us all over that cliff.

August 18, 2009

If you wanted to find an amazing personal success story in the Michigan Legislature, you would have a hard time improving on Rashida Tlaib. The odds against her ever landing in Lansing were long indeed. Her parents are Palestinian refugees, Muslims from the West Bank who wound up here when her dad got a job on a Ford Assembly line. Rashida, their first born, arrived in 1976.

She was followed by no fewer than 13 brothers and sisters, whom she was expected to help care for. She got married at age 21, a dozen years ago. She is now a proud mom herself. But unlike many traditional Muslim women, that wasn’t enough for her. She was the first member of her family to earn a high school diploma, then pulled down a BA in political science from Wayne State University. Next, it was a law degree six years later.

By the time she finished law school, she realized her real love was politics and government. So she got an internship with a legislator. A Jewish legislator named Steve Tobocman, the grandson of Polish immigrants who fled the Holocaust. She had met him when she was working as a social worker in charge of helping immigrants.

How did that work out, a young Palestinian working as the lowliest unpaid assistant to a Jew? She so impressed him that when he became majority floor leader, he hired her for a top staff position.

When term limits meant his career had to end last year, he convinced her to run for his seat. She was skeptical; the district is 40 percent Hispanic; 25 percent black; only two percent Arab-American.

She won the primary in a landslide and got 90 percent in the general election, making her only the second Muslim woman in the nation to serve in a state legislature. “I would have never been here today, if my Jewish boss had not encouraged me,” she told Islam Online when she was sworn in to office.

I’ve seen her in action. She works tirelessly for her constituents. But that has made her a powerful enemy - the Detroit International Bridge Company, which owns the Ambassador Bridge.

Matty Moroun, who owns the company, is trying to build a second span next to it, to try and ward off an attempt to build a new internationally owned bridge a mile downriver. Canada opposes the second span, and has refused to give it environmental clearance.

Moroun is starting to build a ramp for it anyway, and has attempted to steamroller opposition. Talib has been a vocal part of that opposition, accusing the bridge company of not caring about the poor people she represents. Now, the Ambassador Bridge owner is trying to take her out. He has apparently hired one of Detroit’s most notorious figures, Adolph Mongo, to lead an effort to recall her. “This is a tactic to intimidate me,“ she said this weekend. "We are going to fight it and succeed and probably be stronger afterwards.“

I don’t know how this will come out. But I do know that years ago, I had her as a student in one class.